What obscure thing you enjoy do you never get to talk about?
What obscure thing you enjoy do you never get to talk about?
Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don't have to be media related (they still can be though).
Sound engineering. Most people think sound is somehow sine waves and that's it. And well, that's technically correct on some level, but you can layer sound waves on top of each other to create triangle waves or square waves or what specific instruments happen to sound like:
SourceAnd well, these aspects have implications. Like with an oboe, even the basic waveform is quite interesting, so it's excellent for solos.
On the other hand, with a more boring sound, like a sine wave, you can do relatively wild things in terms of melody or combining them into intervals, and listeners won't feel overwhelmed as quickly.And then you've got the fun field of drums. You can often just take white noise (or pink noise etc.) and just make its volume drop off rapidly and that already sounds similar to a drum.
Which is again interesting on the boring/interesting spectrum. That noise signal adds a short moment of chaos into the mix. But then we often make drums play quite structured rhythms to entertain a different boring/interesting spectrum over time.I love sound engineering and design as a whole. Music production was what got me into it. It's still mind boggling to me how much you can do with a simple sine wave and process it into essentially unlimited amounts of various sounds.
I never knew a thing about music theory, synthesizers, drum machines, etc. Almost 7 years down this path and I'm still learning as I go and just as curious as when I first started.
Seeing different instruments through an oscilloscope or watching the different frequencies dance as a whole on an EQ plugin is my favorite.
The thing for me is, I did already know large chunks of music theory before getting into sound design, but traditional music theory doesn't concern itself with waveforms.
So, I know that a fourth interval sounds spiritual or that a triad in the base key sounds like 'home', i.e. you probably don't want to return there fully, unless you're concluding the journey / music piece.
But like, these are two completely random, basic examples and I don't know what the waveforms look like for them. Whether there's anything in the waveforms that correlates with that perception.So, it feels like I learned most of the chemistry without any of the physics. And that I do now need to learn the physics to discover more of the chemistry. That there's potentially even quite large chunks of uncharted territory for music theory, because everyone's so obsessed with chemistry. Will have to see, if I'll discover as grand things as I'm hoping for.
This is interesting! How can I get into this? Do I have to invest in some equipment or can I just use software to create sounds?
No idea, if there is any guided path into this. Much like the other commenter stumbled into it via music production, I stumbled into it via composing.
Personally, I've mostly dicked around with SurgeXT and MilkyTracker.
SurgeXT is a so-called VST plugin for use in digital audio workstations (DAWs), which is what the big boys & gals use to make electronic music. But it can also be started standalone, as just a digital instrument. And then you can type on your computer keyboard to play your sound like on a piano. SurgeXT is powerful, it will overwhelm you. Still does for me.
MilkyTracker presents an old-school way of making complete songs, generally 8- or 16-bit songs.
It's quite reduced in its features, which makes it a lot less daunting, and does allow playing around with waveforms for instruments rather directly.Honestly, I don't think, you can really make a wrong start into this field. Lots of modulation methods have been around since the 70s and 80s, which you'll find in basically any music software.
Try to find something that's fun to you, to do with those sounds, so you keep coming back to try out new things.For example, I'm a musician, so somedays I do just jam out to myself.
But working towards a little 8-bit song and just trying to create pseudo-instruments is also cool.If you do have fun with it, you can splurge on hardware, like good headphones and a MIDI keyboard, but you don't need those to get into it.
Linguistics. Did you know English and Bengali are related? They share an ancestor about 5000 years ago. Russian, Latin, Farsi, and Greek, and lots more are in that family too.
Do you know what languages are not related at all, absolutely 0% aside from borrowings, even though if you know a bit about em they seem like they should be? Japanese and Korean.
you might enjoy reading about Champollion and how he deciphered the hieroglyphic system.
The enormous differences between korean and japanese writing are interesting for someone who can read neither. Is it related to your factoid about the language's relations?
Their writing systems have their own cool histories. Japanese technically has 4 writing systems (kinda 5 if you count the original purely chinese-character based system). Korean used to have Hanja, a Chinese based system, but then some emperor just decided "nope, this sucks, I'm making a new thing", and came up with hangul. Imo hangul is one of the coolest systems out there.
Interesting, I assumed most East Asian languages were originally formed from Chinese.
Chinese did influence a lot of east Asian languages, but it's more like the relationship between Latin and English - lots of borrowing and influence, but it's not an ancestor.
Connections.
I love the stories about how seemingly disconnected events at different times and in different parts of the world actually have a connection. Like how some random chance meeting of two people 100's of years ago started a chain reaction that ended up with us having some cool new technology or idea.
Jeri Ryan, who played 7 of 9 in Star Trek, was married to Jack Ryan, who was a Republican senator. Allegedly,, Jack liked watching her have sex with strangers. They got into a sex scandal that led to Jack Ryan losing the re-election. The man who won that election was, then a political upstart, Barack Obama.
So ... there's this BBC television series presented by Jim Burke that you might enjoy.
For those interested, it's by James Burke, from 1978, and it's called Connections. Episodes are on YouTube.
I wish I could upvote this more than once, I loved that show!
Yep. Loved that show. It's what got me thinking about all of this stuff
There's a connection where 50 Shades of Gray wouldn't have been written without 9/11 happening.
Oh! I also love that too! And thinking about maybe having seen some of my current best friends before we ever met - like we were both at a mall at the same day when we were kids or something.
Basically that one episode of Community!
What’s the difference between complicated and complex? Normally people encounter complicated things in everyday dlife, but what you’re talking about is way beyond complicated. It’s truly complex.
There are other definitions on Wikipedia, but this example should get you started.
And your favorite moviea are butterfly effect and Cloud Atlas?
FPGAs, love the damn things. They're circuits that you can re-program at will after they've been manufactured! If you build, like, a 2-input AND gate, that's all it will ever be. It can only take in 2 inputs and AND them together. But with an FPGA, they're manufactured to be versatile; you "program" the circuit you want to achieve onto the chip, and it will achieve that functionality! You can make a 2-input AND gate, slap it onto a bread board, and have yourself that nifty little AND gate, but if you later decide you wanted it to be a NAND gate, just reprogram the chip and like magic, what was once an AND gate is now a NAND gate. They're great!
I wanted to get into FPGAs when I was making some custom boards with MCUs but I really had a hard time finding a good idea for a starter project with them. How did you get started? Any recommendations?
The "print hello world" equivalent of FPGAs is to make an LED blink. That teaches you how to use an FPGA's clock, divide it down to a frequency the human eye can actually see, and route it out to a pin (the LED on your board). Then you can experiment with your catalog of digital circuit building blocks using buttons, switches, LEDs, and 7-segment displays. You can make your own custom logic of ANDs and ORs to display different logic.
Some super beginner projects I found fun back in college:
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Create a counter, and increment the counter every time you press a button. That's the easy part. Then display the value on a 4-digit 7-segment display. It's harder than it sounds, because you have to learn about time multiplexing! (At any one instance in time, only one digit is on, and the other three are off. Human persistence of vision makes us believe all 4 digits are being shown at once, but in reality, the system cycles through each digit, flashing one on for a few milliseconds, then turning it off and moving to the next one. Implementing this takes effort!)
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Learning Finite State Machines and then implementing your own is fun. I made a "vending machine" state machine once, where different buttons corresponded to inserting different coins, and then once a certain amount of money was put in, you could select which beverage you wanted, the machine would "vend" (an LED would flash), and then change is administered. Another fun and classic FSM is the pattern detector, where you input a series of 1s and 0s, and the machine will blink an LED if it detects a certain pattern in the sequence, say, 11010. This one is a lot harder than it sounds, because it requires a lot of thinking of the different edge cases! If I input 111, for example, the system shouldn't be like, "well he inputted 111 but I was expecting 110..., so I'm gonna start over", because I could input "111111010" and the pattern is there, just at the end. This one teaches you how to draw state diagrams and Mealy/Moore machines!
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Then you can get into using peripherals, like RGB LEDs, gyroscopes, graphics on a screen, ethernet connections, etc. You just need to learn the protocols and follow the correct logic in your own logic. It's a lot of copy and pasting at first, but if you put in the effort to understand what you're copying, you'll pick up on it fast.
Really, the world's your oyster, all you need is a development kit and a program that will synthesize/place&route your Verilog or VHDL.
And if you'd like to start at the very, very beginning, HDLBits is an amazing resource to learn Verilog: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page
Let me know if I can ever be of any assistance :)
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That’s why I love my Analog pocket
I'm so glad Analog Pocket is popularizing FPGAs, a lot of people are discovering them because of it.
CYCLE ACCURATE HARDWARE RECREATION. IT'S INCREDIBLE.
I've been working with fpgas for about 15 years. In that time, the projects have gone from pld style logic as you've described, to process algorithms, and now we're implementing machine learning trained neural nets in hardware and running Linux on board.
It's really wild. They are pretty neat.
Man, no kidding. We've got SoCs, we've got processors running on the FPGA fabric, we've got communications to Ethernet, PCIe, any AXI you like really. They can talk to RAM, storage, other processors, output graphics, kiss me on the forehead, and tuck me in at night. (I think.)
A coworker was telling me about the big shots in New York trading companies that are starting to implement FPGA architectures into their high-frequency trading algorithms, as the blazing high speed and great parallelization helps them squeeze out a couple extra microseconds in their algorithms. I think that's a good sign of people wising up to this potential here.
I don't know of any ML training on FPGAs, but I have no doubt that it can be / it is being done.
Edit: I just remembered the other day, I was shown a module that could take in a grey scale image, do edge dection, and output the edges as a new image file. Which isn't that hard, it's convolution on a sliding window, but what baffled me is that it was done in fewer cycles than could be compiled through C code, and the pipeline wasn't even that deep. It's crazy!
For anyone reading this that is wondering what FPGA stands for, it’s Field Programmable Gate Array. Just figured I’d save some people the trouble of looking it up.
Theology. I've read so many religious texts from all sorts of religions and while many people might discuss the organizations of religion a lot, or make fun of religious people, I rarely get to talk about the belief systems and their cultural relevance to various peoples both now and in the past or even discuss the possibilities of God and what God may be if one existed. I don't study for the belief itself, I personally am an atheist; but knowing these belief systems helps understand people a bit better. Plus some of them are actually full of kick ass stories. Hindu is insane with space battles and shit.
I'm also an atheist who's read most of the major religious texts, and you're right, this is the best way to read them. If I'd sat there going, Ha ha, this is all very illogical, I can prove this didn't happen... well, I wouldn't have had a lot of fun!
I love the bit early in the Mahabharata where two brothers keep fighting and causing chaos. Eventually the gods get annoyed at them and turn one of them into a turtle and the other into an elephant. BUT! They find a shallow lake, so that they can keep fighting, but that causes loads of flooding, so then another god (who's a bird) comes and picks them up and puts them in a giant tree.
Absolute classic, pure mad mythology.
I literally cannot answer this without seeming like a pretentious, arrogant ass. Anyway, quantum field theory, high energy physics, condensed matter physics, generative art, computing algorithms, arcane math theories (meaning difficult to understand, not magical), procedural art, simulations, awesome places to visit in the world, Factorio, the channels I watch on YouTube. Honestly, I don't have anyone around me who cares about or understands most of my hobbies. They all love me and care for me, just not the stuff I like.
What they don't understand is that the factory must grow
And grow it shall. Nice to meet you fellow engineer. Nauvis deserves to be paved for being in the way of our ships.
have you watched the youtube series 'the biggest ideas in the universe'? it's got about all that (no art). That PBS space time channel is additionally quite fire
I never miss a Space Time. So glad I found that years ago. Thank you for the suggestion.
awesome places to visit in the world... the channels I watch on YouTube.
Those sound like two possibilities for general interest conversations. (You don't sound pretentious btw.)
Thanks, and yeah, most of the YouTube channels I watch pertain to the rest of the list. It's kinda hard to find someone who gets excited about Factorio or sorting algorithms.
The travel is great, but where I live is one of those black hole places where people get sucked in and stuck, never really getting (or wanting) to get out and see the amazing places in the world.
Contrary to some of the other comments here I think what you are saying is pretentious, but also that it's good, It's Good to be pretentious, at least sometimes.
I try to think about it like this sometimes: "Don't be a gatekeeper, but also try to hit the in joke when appropriate.
Cassette tapes. They may not have the most accurate sound, but they have a cool, unique sound, and they feel really nice to hold. People who love vinyl often hate tapes. I love both.
I have fond memories of making or receiving mixed tapes. It was very labor intensive to produce and imperfect (start of the songs often cut off, no smooth transition between songs, last song might also be cut off on the end) but that was part of the charm.
When you called up the radio station and placed a request so you could tape it but then the fucking DJ talks over the intro so every mix tape you make with that song has his dumb yapping baked in
I also love both for their unique sounds, but i attribute that to having grown up with cassettes.
I recently started collecting cassettes since a number of metal bands release on the format. Everyone always has an odd reaction when I start talking about why I think they're cool.
I collect both. I still have an old early-90s Sony system that I plunked a modern record player on top of and use almost every day. I also have a (factory) tape player in my old project car and will record CDs to a tape with the same system. Listening to modern music on tapes in an old car is just fun.
I hate that I got rid of my tapes from the 80s.
Cassettes also remember where you stopped listening so it's trivial to continue later from the exact spot.
Computing history, obscure operating systems, movies and music my friends never heard about, fringe humour nobody gets.
You might enjoy Cathode Ray Dude on youtube. Really obscure 80s-00s stuff.
Thanks, sounds like my kind of entertainment!
I spotted a Vectrex in a flea market in a small Canadian town and had no money. :(
Can you give an example of fringe humour that comes to your mind ?
For instance, some Portuguese comedians that are not mainstream in Portugal. Can't get more obscure than that.
I really like messing with various softwares on my computer. Most of the times it's the old webpages and the old pieces of software that engage me the most.
I should probably add something of my own. I like failed firearms designs that had some features that makes them objectively better if you overlook all the downsides. Or generally anything where one person made it because they thought it was cool and no one with better judgement stopped them.
Like the Gyrojet pistols, unlike traditional pistols they used rocket projectiles. This meant two major things one the guns didn't need to have any pressure bearing parts and could be made incredibly light compared to normal pistols (.88lb/.4kg vs 2.2lbs/1kg), and the down side they reached maximum speed much slower than normal cartridges.
This meant that in practical terms a target close enough might not give the rocket sufficient time to accelerate to effective speed and wind would have a greater effect on the projectile. Hence they don't make them anymore.
The PN 90 is used a lot by the movie industry because it ejects casings downwards so they do not hit the other actor's or the filming crew's faces. It was originally made as a relatively small firearm that can penetrate body armour to be used by the truck drivers and guards in case the Soviets invaded and dropped well armoured paratroopers behind the front lines.
I'm a big lover of the engineering and design of firearms, but think we're ridiculously over-armed in the US. Puts me in an odd position; I'm prior service - I look at weapons as weapons. Some people see them as fetishes and it gives me the creeps.
Chess! I suck ass at it so I don't fit in with actual chess players, and everyone I know is totally disinterested in the game. I can only fuel my love for the game by watching Gotham trash talk 1200 rated players when I know that I'm a lichess 700
Astronomy! Not astrology! No, that's not a smudge on the lens, that's M3, and it took me an hour to find it in this Bortle class 7 suburb with my 4.5" dob, and I'm damn proud of myself for that
Anime! No, I haven't seen Naruto, or DBZ, and I ain't got time for One Piece. How's about Shinsekai Yori, Haibanei Renmei, or ACCA? Nah, nobody I know has seen those, even though we're in our late 20s and are a bit old for shounen at this point
Hey fellow chess lover! I'm like 900 on lichess :-D
It's such a rich game it's incredible, and the history about it. Crazy actually.
Morrowind.
True conspiracies. Cryonics.It seems like Morrowind has a tiny cult following in the TES fanbase still. The AI Dagoth Ur memes took off a few months ago.
Asian beauty items, specifically kbeauty and jbeauty skincare. I love hearing about people's skincare routines and new niche items, ingredients and brands. But my friends irl aren't really into beauty (everyone i know is so pragmatic lol).
I really love beauty empties- I used to follow subreddits related to finishing beauty products, aka panning them (panning meaning hitting the metal pan at the base of powder cosmetics; panning has come to generally mean using up your products). There is something so satisfying about using up your stuff and I like vicariously experiencing it through other people. I mentioned that I was saving my empties for a few months to review which ones were worth repurchasing and my friends laughed at me, thinking I was joking.
I don't wear make up but as someone who once got all the toothpaste out of the tube I can relate. Knowing that something got used to it's fullest is quite satisfying.
Obscure 80s and 90s hip hop records that very few people have heard of because they sold less than a couple hundred thousand records, some much less
Classic black and white films and TV shows. No one I know in real life enjoys these.
Because I was an insomniac pre-adolescent, I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners are some of my most comforting memories.
Can you give us some examples of both? Some that you think we will find obscure and some that you yourself find obscure?
This is copied from my reply to another person here.
Most of the music is on Soulseek.
MC Rell is rapper from the late 80s that dropped a pretty good album, very few people have heard of him.
The Lootpack is a 90s hip hop group from LA that was good but for some reason it never caught on, I don't know anyone else who's heard their album.
The older films I like aren't really that obscure, I just don't know any film nerds in real life. I'm a big fan of the Preston Sturges comedy films, film nerds know them but no one I know in real life watches old movies.
Have Gun, Will Travel is one of my favorite western TV shows. It's kind of stuck around but, not like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners did.
There was a series of b movies about a detective called The Falcon. They were kind of a mix of The Thin Man films and the Sam Spade films.
They were lots of fun to watch but I don't know anyone else who's seen them.
You should digitalise those and share them (I mean it would be very cool if you did!), I'm sure lots of people would like it, they just haven't got the time/energy/possibility to find those kind of things.
I'd be interested for example :-)
Most of the music is on Soulseek.
MC Rell is rapper from the late 80s that dropped a pretty good album, very few people have heard of him.
The Lootpack is a 90s hip hop group from LA that was good but for some reason it never caught on, I don't know anyone else who's heard their album.
The older films I like aren't really that obscure, I just don't know any film nerds in real life. I'm a big fan of the Preston Sturges comedy films, film nerds know them but no one I know in real life watches old movies.
Have Gun, Will Travel is one of my favorite western TV shows. It's kind of stuck around but, not like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners did.
There was a series of b movies about a detective called The Falcon. They were kind of a mix of The Thin Man films and the Sam Spade films.
They were lots of fun to watch but I don't know anyone else who's seen them.
The State Emergency Services of Australian states. Basically, they're state government funded volunteer rescue agencies that focus on floods and storms. They also provide other rescue services outside of major population centres, like vertical rescue and road crash rescue. I think it's a great idea because we get enough severe storms and floods that a specialist agency is worthwhile, but there can be years between large scale events, so having the surge capacity of a volunteer agency is great.
It's a similar story with the CFA/CFS/RFS/NTFRS¹/TFS¹/whatever's happening in WA¹, but instead of rescue they do firefighting. Their main ("combat") role is fighting bushfires, which happen seasonally so surge capacity is important. However, in country areas they also provide structural and vehicle firefighting services. I'm aware that the US have a similar situation with volunteer firefighters though, so I'm not so keen to teach grandma to suck eggs.
¹These agencies are metro and rural firefighting agencies, so their combat role is all fires, not just bushfires.
Sounds similar to the German THW (Technisches Hilfswerk - engl. Federal Agency for technical relief) It's 99% (unpaid)¹ volunteers, and they assist in case heavy/specialized equipment is required. For example they build large pipelines and water reservoirs in case of wildfires to supply the firefighters, build tent cities including drinking water filtration, sanitary and kitchen facilities, as well as recovery operations after disasters².
While they mostly act locally (supporting buildings after fires, or recovering car wrecks when the firefighters don't have big enough equipment) they do have some international quick-response forces.
¹ The volunteers are insured via the state, and employers in non-critical jobs are required by law to release them in case of an alarm.
² They were initially founded as a civilian service to restore infrastructure and recover civilians during wartime, (Ziviler Bevölkerungsschutz - engl. civil protection) they thankfully haven't needed to do that job and nowadays focus on natural disasters, both national and intentional.
Similar, except both types of Australian agency do the firefighting and rescue work as well as the support work and some of the recovery stuff. The main focus of volunteer training though is on rescue/firefighting.
Don’t forget the „Freiwillige Feuerwehr“ that carries the bulk of firefighting capacity in German towns.
Rhythm games, 100%. I am a fair bit obsessed with them but I have yet to find a friend who truly Gets It. They either only like music, or they like games. Somehow never the marriage of the two.
I like music, and I like games. But I loathe rhythm games. I'm so bad at them. I have pretty good rhythm in general, but those games kick my arse and frustrate the heck out of me.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that osu! was the beginning of things starting to go downhill for me...
I feel like people could benefit from what I know about Butt Stuff™.
please, go on
He would, but it's trademarked.
NA and NULL values.
In R (programming language) they have some interesting differences. You can think of a vector as a train with many cars, and each can hold a number. Let’s say I have train with three cars and I store the number 2, 3 and 5 in them. That would be a normal well behaved vector (2, 3, 5).
I could take away one of those numbers and leave that seat vacant. It could look like this (2, NA, 5).
If I tell you to find the third number in that vector, that’s easy. It’s 5. If I tell you to find the ninth one, that just doesn’t make sense and the answer would be NULL.
So in other words, NA is a vacant seat with no number sitting in it. NULL is a place where there is no seat to begin with.
I personally think if you are writing code and you reference outside your memory space, then you should receive an error. I guess a null is already considered an error value, but I think notifying why you got a null would be great.
NA is not applicable or?
I don't like this approachThe best thing about R is that it was written by statisticians. The worst thing about R is that it was written by statisticians.
I guess this NULL thing would be one of those cases.
NA would not be applicable, because it’s a placeholder for a missing value. In data analysis, you tend to have have lots of NA-values, and dealing with them is super common. Every function needs to be able to handle them gracefully. For instance
mean(someValues, na.rm=TRUE)would be a command for calculating the mean of a particular vector while igrnoring all NA-values. Super handy. Excel handles these missing values in a very annoying manner, but that’s a topic for another rant.NULL can be considered an error value, but obviously it’s not very helpful because it doesn’t tell you what went wrong. Obviously, R does have all sorts of error messages, but in this case it just says NULL instead. If you find that some variable has NULL in it, you can be pretty sure something went wrong and it’s most likely due to going outside the space of a particular variable. Likewise interger(0), character(0) or logical(0) are the results you get when you’re searching for something that doesn’t exist. Not really my favorite type of error.
(emergency alert system) videos. love them, don't know anyone irl who actually like it or even know that it exists.
Zabbix